


Pink Lovers

by SomeBratInAMask



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Canon amnesia, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, jaydick_flashfic: valentine’s crime, ric grayson - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 10:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17806367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeBratInAMask/pseuds/SomeBratInAMask
Summary: “I love you,” Dick whispers against their mouths. Then his head pulls back and slams into Jason’s.A Valentine's Fay Festival hands out a batch of the Joker's version of candy hearts: drugs that cause lovers to become violently obsessed with each other. Jason has better things to do than pop candy on Hallmark holidays, but Ordinary Guy Ric Grayson clearly does not.





	Pink Lovers

**Author's Note:**

> Dick has amnesia but canon doesn't extend much farther in this fic.

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I love — augh!” The man’s saccharine chant is cut short by a gun cracking against his skull. His body goes limp and Jason catches him before he can hit the asphalt of Park Row Hospital’s employee parking lot. Across from them, an older woman in a lab coat presses herself against a Honda. Her blonde hair escapes in wisps from her toppling bun, glasses askew on her thin nose.

Jason looks at her through his helmet. “This your boy?” he asks. She shakes her head in a negative reply although her eyes remain transfixed on her assailant. She looks like a rabbit about to hightail it out of the meadow. 

Jason adjusts the man in his arms, the attackers’ balding head lolling backwards. Jason peels the man’s eyelids back. They’re exactly what he expects: scleras an unnatural pink, a shade reminiscent of Pepto-Bismol. Red veins web outwards, spindly and swollen. In the center are the pupils blown wide enough to swallow the iris, inky black and forming a nebulous heart as if someone had painted it in with watercolor. 

“He’s just a work friend,” the doctor explains. 

Jason releases the eyelid. “I don’t think he got the memo,” he informs as he gets to work on binding the man’s wrists and ankles.

“He’s not like this. I’ve known him for years, he’s — ”

“Do me a favor, doc.” Jason hefts the man over his shoulders. “Go straight home. Unless you live with your partner, then check into a hotel and don’t talk to anyone who’s not family. No responding to texts, no Snapchatting, just stay inside until the news says it’s safe to be a person again.”

The doctor nods slowly, expression numb with shock. “There was something about this on Channel 4, wasn’t there? I caught some of it, but I’ve been so busy — I wasn’t really… ” she trails off.

Jason sighs; he’s had this conversation several times today. “Latest Joker hijinks.” He runs her through the spiel: a little over an hour ago, candy hearts were handed out at the Valentine’s Day Festival occurring uptown. Everyone who had some soon became violently obsessed with their beaus. At a festival targeting couples, most of the infected didn’t stray very far before getting apprehended on-sight. Trouble is, not everyone was with the one they love and those lonely hearts are left to seemingly attack at random. 

Not everyone wears their heart on their sleeve. Or some just can’t see the obvious. 

“I don’t think I’m that popular to get another attack,” says the doctor with a breathy, frazzled laugh. Jason merely shrugs.

“Don’t sell yourself short.” He leans towards her. “Seriously. Don’t risk it. It was a big festival; who  _ knows  _ who was there,” he adds more lightly. He leaves her to get in her car and do whatever she’s going to do. His own car is hastily parked from when he spotted the two earlier. He drops the man and pops the trunk to the sight of one of the pink-eyed crazies woken up and squirming around. Jason prepares some anesthesia and injects the needle into the throbbing vein of pinkie’s throat. Then he repeats the process with the new guy to be safe and dumps him in the trunk.

Robin’s voice filters through the com. “I’ve taken down four pink-lovers thus far,” he brags. 

Jason snorts. Over the com, he says, “I’ve bagged  _ five.” _

“No, you haven’t,” Robin scoffs. 

“More the merrier, boys,” Oracle interrupts, buried laughter deepening her voice. “We appreciate your help, Hood,” she says like a kindergarten teacher rewarding the bad kid for class participation. 

“Yeah, yeah. It’s my city, too. And you’re down a dick,” he justifies. The bats all keep tabs on “Ric” the best they can, which admittedly hasn’t been difficult considering Ric’s life is remarkably routine for a vagrant. Jason pays him a visit every now and then. It’s plain Dick is regaining memories; nowhere near as many as the bats would like, but any amount has Ric tensing up suddenly during their (infrequent, sometimes fun, often frigid) conversations and running off.

“How’s that antidote coming?” Jason asks. He should probably get going; the goal is to deliver the pink-lovers to the batcave for treatment, picking up any strays along the way. It’s boring as shit. The infected are rabid but ultimately still ordinary people easily taken out. It feels more like a weirdly festive scavenger hunt than an actual mission. 

“Finished, but questionable,” Oracle answers. “Joker basically built upon an earlier bioweapon of his maniacal invention, so we’re hardly fumbling in the dark here but… without a rational human test subject, we can’t in good conscience administer the serum to the pink-lovers we have — ”

“Strapped and ready?” says Jason. He removes his helmet and the pack of cigarettes from his pocket, considers smoking one just to delay inevitably being in the same room as Batman, and then shoves the pack back in his jacket. He gets behind the wheel instead, leaving his helmet on the passenger seat. “Just pop one of the candy hearts and then test the antidote on yourself.” The engine purrs with the press of a button. 

Oracle’s response is not immediate. When it does come it sounds reluctant and somewhat distracted. “That’s what we may end up having to do, yeah. Everyone’s on reconnaissance at the moment, but I guess whoever drops off the next batch of pink-lovers wins a special candy heart.”  
Jason drives down the road slower than his foot itches to go. He needs to keep an eye any signs of dispute from festival stragglers. “You’re not volunteering, I take it?” he says idly. 

Oracle laughs over the com. It’s sharp, almost painful, in his earpiece. “I’m way too important to risk, Hood, you know that,” she quips. “More to the point, I’m not in love. At least, that’s my guess as to why I didn’t go all cray-cray when I  _ did _ pop a candy heart. I then suggested Batman take one — he just tensed up and ran off into the night. Well, early afternoon.”

Movement from a third-story apartment window catches his eye. “Way to take one for the team,” he murmurs, slowing down and craning his neck. 

Batman, as it turns out, is not one to let his good name be sullied because he growls over the com, “If the toxin does have an effect on me and the antidote does not work, that leaves fewer eyes on the streets which, if you have not noticed, are littered with intoxicated citizens cognitively closer to homing pigeons than human beings.”

“It’s true,” Robin vouches. “I just witnessed one get hit by a car because their partner was across the street.”

“Robin.”

“She’s  _ fine.  _ I escorted her to the nearest hospital and told them to get the straps until we have distributed the antidote,” he defends primly. Meanwhile, Jason tries to parse out the body language of the exposed couple. One’s arms extend; another’s push them away. _ Playful or hostile? Playful or hostile? _ Jason muses.

Now Red Robin chimes in, in his usual world-weary tone, “These pink-lovers are more dangerous to themselves than to their targets. They’re out of it — like, totally vacant. The Joker stayed on-brand for this one.”

Jason dismisses the movement as innocent as the couple embraces. His eyes return to the road in time to see a man standing there dumbly. Jason has his foot on the brake too late and his heart lurches into his throat, his stomach following suit. Then the man leaps onto the hood of Jason’s car. The wheels stop abruptly and the man must overcompensate for the force, because instead of being thrown off, his head bashes against the windshield.

This all happens within — a second, two? — three at most. The next second, a car blares its horn angrily before briefly swerving into the other lane to pass him. Jason registers this only distantly. He’s focused on the familiar face of the man clutching his forehead, eyes Pepto-pink and staring into Jason’s. Blood escapes the press of his fingers, collecting at the dip of his broken nose before trailing onto his cheeks. 

Jason pulls over; a task that is mildly complicated by the asshole sticking to his windshield like a bug. He practically kicks the door open. His concern, that sick twist of worry in his gut, is feeding into his agitation. As if gathering kindling, Jason’s mind runs through how this happened. The idiot clearly was at the Valentine’s Day Festival. Of course he was; he’s not Nightwing with a checkered love life or a full plate of crises to resolve. He’s just Ric, an ordinary guy with an ordinary job and an ordinary girlfriend to attend silly festivals with. Happily living out his new life as a passive civilian: a victim waiting to happen. 

Jason is barely out of the car when Dick jumps him. His hands fist into Jason’s collar, trying to shove him back in the car with brute strength. It’s considerable strength, too, considering the months of disuse as a cabbie. But beyond that strength, Dick doesn’t attempt to maneuver him and Jason’s knees don’t buckle. “Get off,” he grunts, seizing Dick’s arms.

“But I love you.”

The phrase hits him like a blow to the chest. Jason looks at Dick, really looks at him. There’s an ugly bleeding gash across his forehead above his angular eyebrows — one now sporting a fashionable slit — and his black hair is growing back fuzzy. Last week Dick’s fingers clasped Jason’s wrist as he laughingly guided Jason to pet the top of his soft head. Today Dick grins joylessly at him, any trace of his baby blues wiped out by the Joker. Jason’s heart sinks with the weighty meaninglessness of Dick’s confession. 

He doesn’t want to look at Dick’s face anymore and forces him to face the other direction. “Jason,” Dick says. His name sounds so clear, so conscious on Dick’s tongue. It doesn’t sound like the Joker. But then Dick repeats, “I love you.”

Anger strikes Jason whip-fast.  _ I love you _ is sacrilege coming from this body that belongs more to the Joker — more to  _ Ric _ — than the man who  _ should’ve _ said it. Maybe Dick would even have had reason to say it from the scraps of their lives he and Jason managed to share together, between all the hatred and the death, the lies and disappearances and new identities. Jason still isn’t sure if that’s what he’s been wanting from Dick, some verbal confirmation of a felt truth, but it’s irrelevant now. Another thing the Joker has taken from them. 

Jason swings Dick around harder than necessary and pins him against the car. He knows it’s a waste of time but still stares into that manic pink, searching desperately for something. He wants some remnant of Dick Grayson to peer at him through those unnatural pupils, make itself known through a sliver of sky-blue iris or a flicker of intelligence. Inky hearts watch him back. 

Jason is caught off guard by the legs that wind around his waist. Dick’s ankles cross together and bring Jason closer. Their heartbeats travel from one chest to the other. Jason just stands there, dumb, between Dick’s thighs until he can actually feel Dick’s heartbeat adjust to his. 

Dick rests his forehead against Jason’s. Jason stops breathing. Dick’s lips touch his but don’t press in. “I love you,” Dick whispers against their mouths. Then his head pulls back and slams into Jason’s. Pain reverberates through his skull in a hot pulsing motion. He releases Dick automatically, but Dick merely stumbles forward in his own pain. Jason catches him only to violently throw him to the ground and rush to the car.

Jason retrieves a shot from his anesthetics kit while Dick clatters to the asphalt like a finished wind-up toy. Jason pops the trunk as Dick rises again and tries to wrench Jason bodily the ground. He resists Dick well enough, but does briefly lose his footing. Dick knocks the needle from his hand. “I love you,” Dick chants. “I love you. I love you. I lov — ”

Jason barrels towards him. “Shut up!” he shouts. He topples Dick over. The two grapple on the cement, Jason twisting Dick’s arm. Dick cries out but otherwise remains focused on getting the upper-hand. Dick attempts to gouge his eyeball out. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Jason seethes, catching Dick’s wrist and snapping it in a flash of fury. Dick screams and Jason thinks there’s something to be said either for Gotham law enforcement or people’s reluctance to be on the streets that no one has grown curious about the Red Hood beating the shit out of some guy in broad daylight next to a trunk of unconscious bodies. 

Business as usual, he guesses. 

Jason quickly stands and dashes for the shot. Dick struggles to his feet with the broken wrist. He’s on Jason shortly, but his grip is weak and Jason is ready with the anesthesia. He whirls around and snatches Dick’s broken wrist. Dick curls inwards. It’s the opening Jason needs to plunge the shot into Dick’s arm. The reaction isn’t instantaneous. Nevertheless, Dick’s movements slow from wild animal to netted fish and his unnatural eyes drift shut. 

Jason zipties him particularly well. He props Dick up, douses a cloth from the front seat with his water bottle, and gently dabs at the blood on his face. Jason’s anger softens to concern over how much pain Dick will be in when he wakes up. He tries not to picture him wincing awake beneath the bloody cloth as if from some ugly dream. Jason tries, first and foremost, not to want things Dick can’t give him. 

The com alerts him that Batman has tested the candy heart and is under its effects. The antidote is being administered. 

 

Bruce’s backseat-driving whilst being restrained turns out to be the real trial. The antidote’s guesswork is spot-on and the worst side-effect is the full body rash that covers Bruce and the other pink-lovers’ skin in red splotches. The bats are still in and out the cave, but most of them stay to help recover the victims. Barbara eventually wheels over to Dick and disinfects the soft hollow of his arm. As she does, she side-eyes Jason and asks, “So, how’d you find him? Attacking his hot new bartender girlfriend?”

It’s either weariness or bitterness that tingers her sarcasm a darker shade than usual. Jason doesn’t know her or her relationship with Dick well enough to tell which. He leans against the wall and watches her fasten a tourniquet around Dick. His nose has been reset and his head bandaged. The wrist is in a temporary velcro brace. 

“Something like that,” murmurs Jason. 

Barbara, ever vigilant, not only notices the word choice but doesn’t let it go. “Something  _ like _ that? As in he was attacking someone else. Wasn’t he?”

Jason merely shrugs. He’d be content to leave it at that except he’d rather satisfy her with useless details than encourage her with silence. “I found him on the edge of downtown. He wasn’t attacking anyone, but the name he called for wasn’t Bea.” Jason drinks from his water bottle. “That’s all I’ll say. Ric’s made it clear he doesn’t want us prying.”

Whether Barbara wholly accepts this information, he can’t decipher. She’s concentrating on the needle sinking into Dick’s vein, her long red hair obscuring half her face as she ducks her head down. She does, however, argue in half-distraction, “No one, including you, has completely respected that.”

Jason neatly deflects the accusation. “That’s to make sure the idiot doesn’t get himself killed by enemies he can’t remember. Beyond that, what’s his life is his life. Not about to snitch on him to his ex-girlfriend.”

It’s a low blow, one which Barbara responds to with an icy gaze that holds onto Jason with cold, clinging fingers. Regardless, his jab has the intended result: Barbara drops the conversation and moves onto the next pink-lover without a word further. 

Jason could help out with the injections, but no one directly asks him to and he’s feeling like he’s reached his quota for bat-cooperation. Instead he pulls up a chair next to Dick and stays on his phone to avoid seeming overly invested in Dick’s progress. With time, though, and the activity whirring around him, Jason does partly forget about the man passed out beside him. At least to the extent that he’s surprised to hear Dick’s voice — rusty with sleep but always, always possessing that slight musical lilt — announce, “I’m annoyed.”

Jason glances down. Dick’s eyes are more than Jason expects, which means he’s probably been awake for a few minutes. They’re also lucid blue, the only reminders of his mania existing in the bloodshot veins. 

Dick’s throat swallows dryly. “I know,” he begins thickly, “I probably don’t have to be. From the looks of this creepy dark room brimming with people also strapped to gurneys, I’d say this has a chance of genuinely being a ridiculous coincidence that I ended up here.”

Jason wants to kiss Dick’s tired eyes and tell him to sleep until all the red is gone. He doubts that would go over well. Tentatively, he inquires, “Do you remember what happened? What you did to — get here?” he finishes lamely. Hopefully it doesn’t come off as blame-finding to Dick as it does to himself. 

Dick licks his lips. “Some of it. Enough to know I probably have a lot of texts from Bea that I’ll put off longer than I should.” He laughs so thinly it could be a cough if not for the wry smile. 

Jason considers laughing back, just as some knee-jerk social reaction, but he doesn’t feel up to it. He turns his phone absently around in his hands. “Yeah, well, don’t put her off too long. This situation isn’t what I’d call easily salvageable.”

Dick’s gaze slides towards him. Their eyes meet. Jason wishes he could read Dick like he knows Dick can read him. “What happened, Jason?”

So Jason tells him. Dick takes it all in, processing sluggishly. Jason nearly opens his phone for something to do when Dick cracks out a “wow.” The word is dry and scratchy, prompting Jason to unscrew the cap on his water bottle and hold it to Dick’s mouth. When he takes it away, Dick continues clearer, “Not many scenarios wherein your girlfriend could be mad you _ didn’t _ kill her, huh?”

“Not many I can think of.”

They’re quiet again. Jason doesn’t open his phone this time. He waits. 

“I think I meant what I said,” Dick admits. “I mean, I guess the Joker knows better than I do — ”

_ “Don’t.”  _ Jason can’t listen to that. He hates that name in a way  _ Ric  _ will never get. But Jason can’t let the Joker be any more a part of them than he already is after the festival.

“Okay,” says Dick, bemused. “I just — I don’t know you. Not really. Sometimes I get flashes of our past together. I like them. And I like us together now, but. It’s not enough.”

Dick’s rejection seers through Jason, flays him alive.  _ You’re not enough. _

Dick mercilessly charges on. “I don’t even know if those feelings are mine or — or Dick Grayson’s. I don’t want something that’s his — ”

Jason refuses to hear more of this spiel. “You’re the same _ person,” _ he snaps. 

Dick falls silent. Jason is grateful for the chaos around them that allows this bubble of privacy. He is starting to shake, raw from the anger and hurt. 

“I know,” Dick says faintly. Startled, Jason accidentally looks up from his hands; Dick is staring straight at him. “I don’t want to be him. I know I am, but I don’t want to be because then I’ll wind up inheriting his life and all the mistakes from it.”

Jason smirks. It’s so damn predictable. Of course this is how Jason would be loved — with regret. “Like me,” he concludes.

“No,” Dick immediately disagrees. “I don’t remember much of us. Mostly the good things actually, but — no, I feel it. You’re not one of my mistakes, whatever you are. Whatever we were, it wasn’t a mistake.”

Jason doesn’t want to tell him the pathetic truth of how they were never anything.

“Jason,” Dick says softly. “I’d like to get to know you.” He eyes the milling bats with something akin to queasiness. “Just you,” he clarifies. “And not as a trial basis for everyone else. This isn’t some open-door policy on my life, but. But. If you can leave — ” Dick gestures his good hand, the one attached to the IV, to the cave, “ — whatever _ this  _ is behind you when we hang, then this could be something. Maybe even something good,” he adds with a teasing smile. 

Dick’s expression is openly hopeful. Jason’s heart aches. He wishes love didn’t feel this way all the time. Truthfully, he doesn’t know if he can compartmentalize like Dick expects. Nor is it fair for Dick to expect that from Jason who does remember, whose life isn’t a before-and-after picture but a composition piece of everything he’s been through. 

Yet Jason swallows the cinderblock in his throat and says, “Yeah. I think we can do that, Ric.”

Dick’s bad hand twitches. He winces around his smile, that legendary Dick Grayson smile that wins over the toughest crowd. Even ones as tough as Jason Todd, Park Row streetrat with a penchant for fistfights and posturing. Jason snorts at the humor of it all, of his life, and reaches across Dick to lightly squeeze the fingers on his good hand. 

Dick squeezes back happily. “Think you can take me home without drawing suspicion?”

“What, about us?”

Dick nods.

Jason considers the question. No one is looking at them. No one has even spared them a single glance. And as landmined as that short conversation with Barbara was, suspicion towards Jason’s dodginess regarding Dick’s love life wasn’t one of those mines. “Yeah,” Jason answers. “I think I’m pretty good about not wearing my heart on my sleeve. What about you, pretty boy?”

Dick’s grin dazzles. “The best,” he replies. 

**Author's Note:**

> Ah! 'Tis done! I originally handwrote all of this before typing it up and editing along the way. This unruly beast used to contain several scenes which needed deleting to make for a smoother flow and more cohesive plot. That being said, there was once a scene wherein Tim finds Dick in Jason's trunk -- because, you see, why should Ordinary Civilian Ric get special treatment? -- and proceeds to carry two large unconscious men over his shoulder, which reminds Jason of a "french fry carrying a sack of potatoes." 
> 
> Also, you can bet there was a scene dedicated to Bruce backseat-driving while the batkids preemptively put him in the restraints for the candy heart reaction. He's super melodramatic. 
> 
> Anyways, I had fun! Hope it was fun for you too :)


End file.
